Should Gnosis DAO grant NodeSet funds to integrate their validator set with StakeWise?

Governance
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Hello Gnosis Community,

My name is Nick, and I’m a co-founder of NodeSet. I’m writing this post to raise discussion about NodeSet’s participation in Gnosis’s validator set. Is the Gnosis DAO willing to consider a grant to cover the development costs for integrating our large node operator community with the Gnosis deployment of StakeWise v3? This will allow us to offer Gnosis a robust, decentralized vault for GNO holders seeking to stake their assets while supporting independent stakers all over the world.

NodeSet is a crypto infrastructure company focused on connecting developers with distributed, independent node operators. We build protocol integrations, tooling, and coordination mechanisms to ensure robust and consistent performance for ecosystems which are in need of scalable, decentralized compute. As of today, our community consists of 400+ operators, the vast majority of whom are home and solo stakers from Ethereum. The community is full of passionate, technical enthusiasts who are eager to use their knowledge and skills to secure other protocols and services.

Recently, we delivered our first Ethereum mainnet protocol integration with StakWise, where we partnered with Gravita to deploy a decentralized vault. Each validator in the vault is operated by a different node operator somewhere across the globe, whereas most vaults are operated by a single operator running all delegated assets in their own centralized infrastructure. Our vault is unique, and directly benefits the long-tail of operators who keep Ethereum decentralized!

NodeSet would like to operate similar StakeWise v3 vaults for GNO holders. The Gnosis community shares the same core values of Ethereum, including focusing on heavily decentralizing its validator set, which is core to the chain’s credible neutrality and security. At NodeSet, we’re eager to develop products that also support and strengthen the networks we rely on, and a Gnosis staking vault represents an exciting opportunity for us to deliver on that goal.

After initial positive conversations with members of the Gnosis team (see Armagan’s recent X posts about the StakeWise deployment mentioning “@nodeoperators”), we think it’s time to broaden the discussion and get feedback from the greater community. The NodeSet team is currently in high demand, which means we will need your support to deliver a Gnosis-specific integration of our StakeWise technology. This is likely a 5-10 engineering week project, but once deployed, NodeSet can operate numerous vaults.

NodeSet Cost/Engineering Week: $15,000 USD

Total Project Budget: $75,000-$150,000 USD

Potential Major Milestones:

  1. POC Gnosis support in Hyperdrive
  2. Orchestration Layer Integration
  3. Public Testnet & Launch

Looking forward to discussing further!

P.S. To any Gnosis community members who operate validators on Gnosis or Ethereum mainnet, we would be thrilled to have you join NodeSet as an operator! You can sign up for free here.

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Two comments on this:

  1. My team and I have previously worked to set up and operate Gnosis Chain nodes. Despite having a technical person leading the effort (granted they are more python-focused), we realized that we could not operate the nodes ourselves given time and resource constraints, and the need for our technical team member to educate himself on the nuance of the process. As a result, we decided not to operate the nodes that we were originally pursuing. Given that, my sense is that investing in the decentralization of Gnosis’ validator set will support it’s long term success. The dev tools for these efforts are still relatively low-level from my understanding and NodeSet has spent years working on exactly these types of problems.

  2. Having connected with Nick a few times over the past several years, I believe that he is building infrastructure with a very high amount of integrity and – if I can say so – a vision for web3 that I believe aligns well with the overall ethos of the Gnosis ecosystem (obviously I’m painting with a broad brush here and there are varied points of view within the Gnosis ecosystem, etc. etc.)

I hope this provides helpful / productive context as others consider this proposal.

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